Yesterday, I tried to upgrade from WordPress 2.84 to 2.9.
Before I even twitched I did full backups of the posts by using the Export function and downloaded the SQL file from the MySQL database where WordPress resides.
Confident that if there was a problem I could rely on these backups I clicked the prompt at the top of the dashboard screen ‘WordPress 2.9 is available! Please update now’.
The update proceeded but halted when the time came to update the MySQL database. It stopped and reported that MySQL version 4.1.2 or higher was needed. My hosts are still using MySQL version 4.0 so the update could not continue. Without downloading 2.9 and checking the readme file or checking the WordPress download area, there’s no indication in the admin section of the Blog that this version of MYSQL was needed. These MySQL (and PHP) requirements should be added to the dashboard panel notification message to avoid this sort of problem.
I could still see all the blog posts but every time I wanted to log in to Site Admin I just got the report that MySQL version 4.1.2 or higher was needed. So WordPress 2.9 was not usable.
No problem, I could just go back to using WordPress 2.84 and upload all the backups to get the blog up and running.
This is when I discovered that the backups had only captured posts for 2007 and nearly all of 2008 – they had not saved any of the posts for the the last quarter of 2008 or the whole of 2009, nor any of the draft posts that I was working on. I then checked all my weekly backups to see if I could replace perhaps some of these lost posts. But each and every xml file and sql file exhibited the same problem. The only saving grace was all the images that had been uploaded from 2007 through to 2009 were saved out of the wp-content/upload folders.
This now means that a whole lot of Blog posts have been lost.
To cut to the chase, the only way around this was to install WordPress 2.84 from scratch and then use our current blog style and saved plugins to get back to some sort of order. Although the blog now looks right we had 246 posts on 22/12/2009 but today there are only 105! So 141 posts are missing and unrecoverable.
The last post that was uploaded on 22/12/2009 – How to upgrade your computers memory – has been re-posted but the gap between this and the last saved post is now close to 17 months.
I sincerely hope that you avoid this upgrade problem, so check all your backups and make sure your hosts are running MySQL version 4.1.2 or higher before you upgrade to WordPress 2.9.
